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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/30077763">All Our Ashes Burning Bright</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/velvet_green/pseuds/velvet_green'>velvet_green</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Critical Role (Web Series)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Episode: c02e129 Between a Ball and a Hot Place, Gen, episode AU, this fic is dark</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 19:42:03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,708</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/30077763</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/velvet_green/pseuds/velvet_green</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The fight in the cave takes a different turn. Beau, Fjord and Yasha are left to deal as best they can.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Beauregard Lionett/Yasha</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>71</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>All Our Ashes Burning Bright</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Spoiler warning for everything up to and including episode 129.</p><p>The idea for this got stuck in my head during the first 30 minutes of the episode, bloomed during the cave fight and demanded to be written immediately (“immediately” as in I haven’t even finished watching the episode yet…). </p><p>Please heed the warnings – this is not a happy story! Major character death and dark happenings; this fic is bleak, I mean it.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They bury their friends near the mouth of the cave, their graves side by side. </p><p>They’re not even true graves, really – the ground is too hard for that, mostly stone, but after some searching, they find a place with a top layer of looser, smaller rocks they can remove.</p><p>The resulting pit is just large enough to hold all of them, Jester, her mom, Caleb, Caduceus. Little Luc, framed by his parents on either side.</p><p>Beauregard has a vague notion that one is supposed to say children look “like they’re sleeping” when they go, but Luc looks far from that, with half his face burned off.</p><p>She never was one for that kind of phony sentiment anyway.</p><p>She just hopes it was quick.</p><p>When it’s done, Yasha takes out her book, the one she uses to press her flowers, the one she’s saving up for Zuala, and braids a flower into the hair of each of them.</p><p>Beau makes sure Caleb’s books are secure in their holsters. He wouldn’t have it any other way.</p><p>Besides, at that point, they still haven’t given up on returning, that there’s some way to get them back.</p><p>They take most everything else, and cover those they leave behind back up with rocks, just enough so that, should any straying wildlife come to call, there won’t be anything interesting for them to find.</p><p>They speak a few words. They cry. They walk away.</p><p>There’s nothing else left for them here, now.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>––––––––––</p>
</div>At first, they remain hopeful. Beau reads all the books she has on her, which is all the books she could grab from the part of the bookcase in the cave that wasn’t burned to cinders, in the hopes of finding something that can help them get away from here.<p>Their ticket out was supposed to be Jester, or Caleb. Neither of them are here for that anymore.</p><p>They talk before they go to sleep, in the early light of dawn. (It hadn’t taken them long to learn that the days here are too hot for travel, the midday sun brutal and relentless, and now their nights have become their days. If Beau were given to whimsy, she’d say there’s a certain poetry to that.)</p><p>Beau remembers from her monk training that there are cities in their own right on the plane of fire – for that is where they are, according to the journal they found lying close to the entryway in the cave.</p><p>Close to Caduceus’ corpse.</p><p>(They talk about that day only once – the exhilaration they’d felt coming away from their close shave with the golem, how it immediately turned to horror upon appearing in that cave of slaughter. </p><p>How they still don’t know what happened. How they likely never will.</p><p>What they should have done differently.</p><p>That last one is the part that truly hurts, the part that ends in shouting and recriminations and gentle Yasha going away to hack at a boulder with the sword the great Lady Kima loaned her until even the enchanted metal shows deep nicks.)</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>––––––––––</p>
</div>If they’re close to the City of Brass or any other place humanoids call their home on this plane, they haven’t found it yet.<p>It doesn’t help that the heat is relentless, causing them to feel parched and exhausted almost constantly despite the fact that food and drink aren’t a problem, not yet, thanks to the jar of bobas Fjord liberated from one of Caleb’s coat pockets. At the time, it had felt like stealing from a dead man – it had been stealing from a dead man, even if that part hadn’t truly sunken in yet – but they would have been dead too within a few short days if he hadn’t done it.</p><p>That doesn’t make Fjord feel any better. Nothing about any of this makes him feel better.</p><p>They’ve been wandering the plane of fire for about a month now – time turned into a malleable concept measured by the nicks Fjord makes in his belt every night upon waking. Fjord doesn’t think he can keep this up.</p><p>None of them can keep this up.</p><p>He’s started to dream of the ocean again, dreams he knows don’t come from Uk'otoa but from his own desires. In them, he is a young man again, no more than a boy really, sailing the seas for the first time, in awe of the vastness of the blue surrounding him, heart singing in joy with the cry of the sea birds as the wind blows.</p><p>The first true home he’d ever known.</p><p>Somehow, he doesn’t think he’ll see it again.</p><p>Mostly, he’s just tired.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>––––––––––</p>
</div>Fjord dies first.<p>A part of Beau that she knows is unworthy is almost jealous – at least he’s gotten it over with. </p><p>She and Yasha are left to struggle on as best they can. They leave him in a shallow grave with another flower in his hair, a grave similar in build to the one holding the rest of their family, and keep on walking. They still travel by night and rest by day under whatever rock outcropping or stone overhang they can find. Once, they even come across a tree, small and withered and probably half dead already. Beau’s not sure how that happened; perhaps an errant seed hitching a ride that another journeyman dropped without even knowing while they went on their way. Perhaps just a fluke of nature. Either way, she’s grateful for the smile it brings to Yasha’s face to see green again.</p><p>They haven’t seen green in so long, now that Fjord’s gone. They barely see any colours at all, except for the searing red of fire and lava; apart from that, their entire world has turned to washed out yellows and browns, contrasted by the dark shades of the night and the uncompromising brightness of the sun during the day.</p><p>Even her normally vibrantly blue Cobalt Soul robes have faded to a dull almost-grey, colour beaten out by the sand the relentless wind carries across the rocky plains.</p><p>Sometimes, they make love in the moonlight. There’s no-one left to care. </p><p>(Beau remembers her first tentative experimentation back in Kamordah. She remembers how the others gave her shit about the noise the night she snuck off with Keg. She remembers her and Yasha’s tower date, and how much care Caleb put into it. </p><p>It surprises her how, after everything, she still has tears left, even if they dry up quickly in the heat. Yasha doesn’t say anything, just holds her close and cards her fingers through hair grown brittle.)</p><p>Those moments actually make Beau feel better for a little while, her and Yasha lying close together, skin too dry for sweat and both too tired to move much after the first frenzied need has been satisfied.</p><p>Then they get up again and move on, and sometimes, when the moon shines on Yasha’s face just so, it is enough to make Beau fall in love with her all over again, and for a brief moment, she is happy.</p><p>For a brief moment, she thinks maybe they will get through this after all.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>––––––––––</p>
</div>Yasha moves on alone after Beau is gone.<p>She left her behind, well hidden from predators under a pile of rocks, kept company by the book of flowers Yasha assembled so painstakingly.</p><p>Yasha doesn’t think she’ll need it anymore – there are no flowers here to add to it, after all, and besides, it was never meant for Yasha to begin with but for someone she loved.</p><p>Everyone Yasha loves has now moved on without her – everyone except for Molly, and what’s happening to him is its own pain -, and it seems fitting that Beau take what was meant for Zuala with her. Maybe the two women she loved most will meet in the world that comes after. Yasha hopes if that happens, they’ll be friends.</p><p>She keeps carrying on regardless. It’s what Beau would have wanted, what Zuala would have wanted, what Caduceus and Veth and Jester and Caleb and Fjord and Molly and all the others would have thought was best. It’s what she expects of herself.</p><p>She still owes the world so much, even if she’s come to terms with the fact that not everything that happened during her time with the Laughing Hand was her fault. As long as there’s a chance, she’ll keep going.</p><p>But it hurts, oh, it hurts, and sometimes, she has to keep herself from turning around and going back to that last stone monument left along the way, to await the end there.</p><p>She knows her time is running out – there’s only a few bobas left now in the jar that was nearly full when they started out, just enough for two weeks at most. Yasha doesn’t know what she’ll do after that; she hasn’t seen any water since their canteens ran dry on the second day.</p><p>She’s tried praying to the Stormlord in every way she knows and in every way she’s seen Jester and Caduceus do with their deities, but the skies have refused to answer. Maybe the Stormlord doesn’t hold dominion over these lands; there’s been no rain, not even a single cloud in the sky, since she got here.</p><p>Still, she walks, and she prays, and she tries to hope. She owes that much, to everyone she ever wronged. To everyone she ever loved.</p><p>To herself.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>––––––––––</p>
</div>Yasha’s still alive a week later, when the skies above suddenly boil over with the clouds she’s so sorely missed and open up, bringing with them a gush of cold wind foreign to these hot landscapes.<p>What emerges is not simple rain nor even the Stormlord but a city of nightmares, a city she’d glimpsed before in an underground cave on an island in an ocean far away, and Yasha knows what that means.</p><p>She closes her eyes, permits herself a moment to mourn for more lives lost, for Essek and Yussa and Pumat and Gustav and all the other people she’s ever known and all the people she’s never known on the plane of Exandria.</p><p>Then she opens her eyes again, sets her feet in a fighting stance and raises her sword, nicked as it is.</p><p>No matter how hopeless, she won’t go easy.</p>
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